The collapse of the Western Roman empire is a notoriously tricky subject matter, the conceptualization of which is still vigorously debated to this day, with even the question of whether the empire collapsed at all still a contentious issue. I suspect a large part of the reason for this lies in the clunkiness of our Western language structures though, which for complex historical and cultural reasons, developed into a largely thing-centered language as opposed to a process-centered one.
Lambert Strether over at the Naked Capitalism blog recently explored some of the technical aspects of this issue, and makes a series of excellent points about it. Further, a commenter noted that Robin Wall Kimmerer in Braiding Sweetgrass more or less expresses a similar view: that the 70/30 ratio of nouns to verbs in English is inverted in the Potawatomie language, which is much better at expressing living processes as opposed to "things" which are to be manipulated. A wonderful and moving book, I might add.
The late David Graeber and other thinkers have located this disjunction all of the way back to the ancient world, in which the thing-centric thinkers Plato and Aristotle came into favor at the expense of the process-thinking Heraclitus.
To illustrate, even many of our verbs possess a noun-like quality. One of the most common words - alongside other words like "fall" - we use for what happened to the Western Roman empire is "collapse," which is chiefly a verb and a process but is often used as a noun, frozen in the mind's eye as a sudden and calamitous deconstruction, say like a collapsed building or bridge, which in their strict functional sense, are no longer the specific, functional structures they used to be, but mere chaotic assortments of disaggregated components, at their final rest and of use to no one.
And this frozen, decisive image is rooted in the observer with a potent emotional impression, which could be a mixture of awe and dread and other feelings, and which is carried in the present moment, and compared with and measured against one's own surrounding circumstances and experiences.
The academic and collective intellectual understanding of this historical event then - like many others - proceeded in a sort of "tumble," in which a generation of somber scholars sifted through the historical data and concluded, "my god, the empire collapsed and its people were plunged into a dark age." And then the next generation came on its heels, their sunnier disposition recoiling at the dour outlook of their predecessors, and so the history was revised to account for a possible "continuity" of the empire through the sprouting of the Germanic kingdoms within the Western empire's shell: "no no, it didn't collapse at all, and there was no such dark age," and so on. And then the subsequent generations would take the truths intuited by the various camps - and I should add move intellectually in a relational and process-centric direction - and synthesize those with newly added historical data to produce what we have today.
And what do we have today? The "collapse" of the Western empire was indeed calamitous when taken over the couple of centuries it took to happen, and it was calamitous for everyone involved, though the catastrophe certainly unfolded through an uneven geographical and temporal distribution. In particular, the 400's CE in Western Europe were complete bloody chaos. A lot of this could be attributed to a conjunction of historical timing and the rapid and mass movement of an enormous amount of human energy in the form of the great Germanic migrations touched on here before.
To simplify, the triggers could be conceived as climate change and Hun migrations from the east, which set a rolling mass of people into motion, crashing them into each other, first in the steppes and then into the metaphorical and literal walls of the Roman Empire in turn, overwhelming those walls as they weakened and degraded in historical time. The calamity occurred in those deadly oscillations of difference: in the great amplitudes of rapid and mass movements and antagonisms of desperate people.
The Germanic peoples and the Roman empire had existed side by side for centuries, if not in peace, then in resigned and occasionally irritated tolerance. But that uneasy dam finally broke under the strain of the great migrations: the displaced Germanic tribes required a constant expansion and movement to escape the human flood of climate and war displaced peoples from the north and east, an expansion that met its limits at the huge and inflexible borders of an emplaced territorial Roman state, which required a set-fastness and a stability to provide the constant political, economic, and technological development of a settled civilization. It was this sharp difference in delimited ways of being between the Romans and the Germanic tribes that pitted these forces against each other, eventually shaking the Roman state apart.
We locate the calamity in this process in the catastrophic loss of continuity in the functions of the Roman state, and the loss of wide-ranging trade and economic and political circulation within the massive Mediterranean domain of the Roman Empire, which clearly shows in the historical record in profound changes in material quality of life across class during that time period, and the steady regional material degradation that shows up in the archeological record, as well as the collapse of global complexity within the empire and the progression into localization and simplification in the western side of the empire, not to mention the constant bloodshed in the form of warfare and civil war that both caused and was caused by this loss in continuity.
But we also have a couple of very different tracks of continuity to disentangle from this mess, which vastly complicates - and makes much more interesting - our conception of collapse here. The very peoples that helped to topple the weakening and tottering Roman Empire were also the ones who helped dust it off and reanimate its corpse.
Over the course of centuries, the Germanic tribes were gradually hooked into the Roman system in various ways. In divide and conquer strategies, the Romans would shower sympathetic chieftains with wealth, ingratiating those chieftains and inculcating into them an identification with the empire and a settled way of life, setting them against enemy tribes. Germanic peoples would also be taken up into the empire itself and settled within, serving in the Roman legions.
Especially after the crisis of the third century when the Roman military was chewed up by plague and civil war, Rome's appetite for Germanic soldiers grew, and as the empire's decline advanced in the 4th and 5th centuries, Germanic peoples would advance ever higher in the military ranks and were given ever more responsibilities, and eventually land and delegated authority, which took root in time and would grow into kingdoms of their own as the central authority of Rome finally disintegrated.
The Romanized Germanic peoples would come to identify with the empire, and looked up to its power and prestige and believed in it as a political, cultural, and economic entity. And they would form an alliance with the still-standing church, commanding its spiritual and ideological authority in return for its military protection in order to reproduce the forms and functions of the empire at smaller scale in a more localized manner, economically simpler and using less circulating energy, at least for now.
Existing infrastructure that still functioned was used, and what was not functional was stripped and repurposed, and the monasteries worked feverishly to copy all of the knowledge they could, while authorities scraped old Roman political and legal documentation in order to reproduce and properly name and carry out the old legal and political forms of the empire.
Words like "fall" and "collapse" do have a focusing function: they point to something that did indeed come to an end, in order to describe the consequences and directions of that end. But also, what fell and what collapsed and when? And then what did it do after that? Apparently, things didn't fall as far - or collapse as completely - as the images suggest. And Western Europe was indeed plunged into chaos and tumult in their own sort of "Warring States" period for another thousand years while the Eastern empire stayed standing during that time.
But then the walls of the Eastern empire did finally fall, while the turbulence and fragmented turmoil of the West - with that turmoil taking place amidst the ruins of the Western empire, complete with all of the material, ideological, and intellectual trappings those ruins would provide - would produce that terrible and vigorous stable of European powers which would explode onto the global stage in the colonial era and dominate the rest of the world in turn.
Language is a funny thing. But you can use that very funniness to dig deeper into the history, to reveal a richness and strangeness that defies the understanding.
